Same-race faces are perceived more holistically than other-race faces
By Caroline Michel, Roberto Caldara, Bruno Rossion. 2004
166 citations recorded by the source corpus.
People are better at recognizing same- than other-race faces but the theoretical explanation of this phenomenon is still controversial. Here we tested the hypothesis that the “other-race effect” is related to a reduced ability to encode configural information on other-race faces. Caucasian and Asian participants had to match whole faces to isolated facial features, or onto whole faces differing by a single feature, on both Caucasian and Asian faces. Participants performed better with whole faces as compared to isolated features, demonstrating a “holistic processing” of faces (Tanaka & Farah, 1993). For Caucasian participants, this “whole/ part advantage” was observed only for Caucasian faces. Asian participants who had been living for about a year among Caucasians had a comparable whole/part advantage regardless the race of the faces. These results indicate that same-race faces are processed more holistically than other-race faces, as a result of experience. However, despite processing Caucasian faces as holistically as Asian faces in this paradigm, Asian subjects still presented a large other-race effect. This observation suggests that holistic encoding may be a necessary step in order to be able to recognize other-race faces efficiently, but that it is by no means sufficient to overcome the other-race face effect.
Subfields: Cognitive Neuroscience, Experimental and Cognitive Psychology
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/2cd5b50376616955b7edcb88fab4825a8bb147bf
How researchers see this paper
The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.
In Cognitive Neuroscience
In Experimental and Cognitive Psychology
Citations in the corpus
- The composite face illusion: A whole window into our understanding of holistic face perception (2013, unknown): “To give an overview, for ‘‘other-race’’ face studies see, for example, Michel, Caldara, and Rossion (2006) and Tanaka et al. (2004); for low spatialfrequency dominance, see Goffaux (2009); for studies in children see, for example, Carey and Diamond (1994), Pellicano and Rhodes (2003), Tanaka, Kay,…”
- Is eye contact the key to the social brain? (2010, background): “Further discussion of our typology follows in section R3. For ethologists, functional is synonymous with “adaptive.” But it is also the case that the discussion of the relationship between function and form, among ethologists and evolutionary theorists, is not settled or consensual. The debate is, i”
- The composite face effect in six-year-old children: Evidence of adult-like holistic face processing (2007, unknown): “Both effects are stronger for own-race than other-race faces, unless the subject has been living for more than a year among individuals of the other race (Michel, Caldara, & Rossion, in press ; Michel, Rossion, et al, 2006 ; Tanaka, Kiefer, & Bukach, 2004 ).”